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Flying Skulls over Burma By the time I graduated from high school in Oklahoma during 1940 at the ripe old age of 19, I could see that the United States was going to get dragged into a world war. I had grown up in a farming family during the Great Depression and had felt the […]

1906 – The Wright brothers are granted a U.S. patent for their airplane control system. 1943 – A U. S. Navy antisubmarine hunter-killer group scores a kill of an enemy submarine for the first time when General Motors TBM Avengers from the escort aircraft carrier USS Bogue sink the German submarine U-569 in the North […]

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1893 – Birth of Paul Strähle, German World War I fighter ace who ran Luftverkehr Strähle,a pioneering air mail service, and later served during World War II. 1917 – A Royal Naval Air Service Curtiss H-12 Large America flying boat bombs and sinks the German submarine U-36 in the North Sea; U-36 becomes the only German submarine sunk […]

1908 – The first U.S. military office to pilot a modern aircraft is Thomas Etholen Selfridge; he takes to the air alone in AEA’s newest craft, White Wing, traveling 100 feet on his first attempt and 200 feet on his second. 1918 – Death of Raoul Lufbery, a French-American fighter pilot and flying ace in World War I; he perishes in combat with a German Rumpler reconnaissance […]

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1916 – Kiffin Yates Rockwell is the first American to claim an air victory when he shoots down a German plane over the Alsace battlefield in France. 1934 – The Douglas DC-2, an American 14-seat, twin-engined airliner, enters service with Transcontinental and Western Air. 1940 – First flight of Saab 17 (shown), Swedish bomber-reconnaissance aircraft. 1971 – Birth of Desiree Tyler Horton, American helicopter pilot and television personality; she is one […]

In August, 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced the creation of a single-day celebration to honor all the members of the military, no matter the branch. It was known as Armed Forces Day. In honor of the 66th annual Armed Forces Day, here are 13 facts you may not know about the U.S. military. […]

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For the second year, the Yorkshire Air Museum let visitors experience what life was like at an RAF air base in 1944. After you read what they had to say about the event you (like me!) may be tempted to plan a vacation to the UK next May! From the Yorkshire Air Museum: 2018 Against […]

Before the Gooney Bird, there was the Condor By Joe Gertler The T-32 design originally focused on The Condor as a twin-engine biplane, bomber, ambulance and troop transport. It was first flown in 1933. Curtiss Company blueprints and reports showed the Condor with its many machine gun ports in the nose, and on the top […]

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By Barrett TIllman Kern County, California, 1952: a 1949 Kaiser raced down a desert runway with a streamlined object fitted to a crude bracket on the right side. Lacking a wind tunnel, the passengers — engineers in the front and back seats — took notes on the model’s aerodynamic performance. They were testing the XAAM-N-7, […]

1963 NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper launched into space on the Faith 7 mission in his Mercury space capsule. Mercury-Atlas 9 was the final manned space mission of the U.S. Mercury program, launched from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft, named Faith 7, completed 22 Earth orbits before splashing down in the Pacific […]